a way for smaller businesses, as
well as laboratories or other third
parties, to get involved in developing and delivering warfighting
capability.”

“If you build your system around
plug and play, there are going to be
other vendors watching,” Oliver
said. “If they think they’ve got a
solution that they can bring to the
market more quickly, then at least
you have a backup, as opposed to a
proprietary legacy system that, once
you’ve locked in a contract, you’re
locked in with the vendor for the
life of that system.”

OA offers the potential of
addressing one of the major complaints of the defense industry:
that of development costs being
driven up by changing government
requirements. A plug-and-play OA
environment will enable industry
to more rapidly — and at less cost
— respond to changing requirements by changing out solutions
rather than re-architecting entire
combat systems.

Although the OA concept is founded on openness
and functions with standard interfaces, it actually
allows industry to preserve proprietary secrets within
subsystems

“Nobody is saying they have to open up their black
boxes to give away their secrets, as long as they’re willing
to meet the standardized interface requirements to allow
them to connect to the necessary systems,” Oliver said.

By encouraging the best ideas to come forward, OA
opens up a program for more bidding by contractors
that are too small to be prime contractors on major programs. OA even allows program managers to acquire
components developed by nonprofit organizations.

“You can be sure if a small business that knew the
technology and knew the concerns [was] in the room,
it could challenge somebody who was proposing a
solution that wasn’t optimum or might have been giving an existing vendor some kind of an advantage,”
Oliver said.

“That’s the importance of bringing all the players
together and not having it done behind closed doors,”
he said. “Even if you have to do some making of the
sausage in smaller groups, [it helps to] roll it out on a
regular basis to get people to be able to poke holes at it
just to make sure that it’s not being unduly influenced
by one group or another.”

U.S. NAVY

The Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ships are being built with open architecture
computer hardware and software systems employing a modular design that
promotes greater interoperability and plug-and-play capability, and a means for
quickly upgrading system components. The newly commissioned USS
Freedom, the first Littoral Combat Ship, is shown here arriving at the U.S.
Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., Dec. 10 before traveling on to Norfolk, Va.,
for post-delivery tests and sea trials.

Tweaking Business Models

Implementation of an OA marketplace structure is requiring industry to undertake changes to its business models.

“Industry is naturally reluctant to do this if they are
uncertain as to the government’s intentions over the
long term,” Benedict said. “As we become more consistent in our message about the use of OA principles and
practices, industry will be more focused on delivering
those values back to us. Our message to industry is
most powerful when we put it into our contracts.”

The nexus of implementing OA is the program
manager, whose job has become more challenging —
and potentially more rewarding — with the acquisition
changes brought about by the OA emphasis. PEO IWS
has published the “OA Contract Guidebook for
Program Managers,” which is mandatory for consultation for all new contracts issued by the PEO.

“We’re asking program managers to assume a lot more
risks than they had when they had a prime contractor to
deliver [the systems],” Oliver said. “But did they really
not have the risks before? They were depending on that
prime vendor to coordinate all the risks, so it takes a different kind of perspective for the program manager.”

Oliver said top leadership will need to reward program managers for assuming the increased risk of
depending on more small vendors and help the them
to adjust to the culture change.